Alyx Vance
Alyx Vance is supposedly the daughter of Eli Vance, and as Life with Lamarr is set some years before the events of Half-Life 2, she is one of the world's last teenagers. This being so, Alyx is moody and temperamental, trapped in the strange, unsettling void between child and adult-hood. Her demeanour and mode of speech are shown to be typical 'valley-girl', but to give her a little more depth of character Co based the relationship between herself and Barney (he being the only character we ever really see her interact with) on the real-life relationship between himself and a genuine 14 year old girl called Hannah - a friend of the family. Although there is genuine affection, they are also highly competitive and Co, like Barney, remains bewildered by his continued failure to gain any verbal advantage and score points from this irksomely quick-witted girl-child. Character History Book Two: The Free Children's Commune Barney first spots Alyx on entering the Commune and makes a suggestive reference to her to Eli, the latter sharply informing Barney of her age and the fact she is Eli's daughter. Barney apologises and mentions her height as making her age deceptive. As Co didn't have the knowledge to alter models at this point, that seemed the best way to overcome the problem that Alyx was exceedingly tall for a supposed 14 year old. Alyx watches them for a while, and then reveals her dissatisfaction with the new-age life at the Commune. Having firstly secured Barney into her power by stealing and hiding Special Male Interest magazines from his locker, she then involves him in various schemes to get her out of White Forest. Convinced that the answer lies behind Eli's lab door she tries to persuade Barney to get hold of the entry code - not a simple task, as the only copy of this code is tattooed onto Eli's bio-mechanical penis. The scheme is rumbled by Eli, and they are both frogmarched into the lab where Alyx first catches sight of the unconscious Gordon Freeman, with whom she immediately falls in love. After Eli leaves the Commune in Kleiner's makeshift flying machine, she briefly despairs then orders Barney to recover her valuables - these being lip gloss, Vampire novels, Dog and other assorted teen-girl paraphernalia. After their final escape, Alyx takes a different path from Kleiner and Barney, stating that she wishes to make her way to City 17, become a beautician and upgrade Dog into a washer-dryer. The final Alyx-revelation for Book Two is made by Kleiner: Eli is not Alyx's real father as he was congenitally impotent. According to Kleiner, there are many candidates for Alyx's father, and he himself is just one of them. Book Four: The House of Longfigger She first appears to a sulking Barney scaring him with her vampire fandom and tells him how she is "living" with Gordon and gives Barney hints as to why alcohol no longer has any effect. She later reappears to Barney who's sobriety is getting worse, having given up the vampire style for grunge music style. Due to Barney's state she recommends that he join Alcoholics Anonymous. Later, having become lonely due to Gordon's coma she decides to go and ask Kleiner for assistance in restoring him to consciousness. She gets to the lab to find no one there and waits for Kleiner and Barney to return. When they return they are in a hurry to leave, having just becoming some of the few people to know Dr. Breen's secret, a discussion that leads to Alyx discovering that Eli was not her biological father. However while there they are ambushed by Tim who has become homicidal, she uses Mel's shoot-gun to kill Tim's Bullsquid body, however Lamarr is still killed by Tim. She later attends Lamarr's funeral. When Kleiner returns to his lab to retrieve Tim to make him pay for Lamarr, Alyx asks about her biological father, Kleiner compares her DNA to the City 17 database revealing her father. When leaving the lab she is asked by a man if she is Kleiner's daughter, she tells him that her father is Odessa Cubbage. Trivia *Alyx was the first model to have a permanently modified texture. She was given braces on her teeth, amateurish makeup, a 'Twilight' T-shirt, a Hello Kitty necklace and freckles. By Book Four however, she no longer needs her braces.